Twenty-one years of arguing well about a mountain

Following the transfer of communal forests and pastures from state administration to local government in the late 1990s, the highland villages above Krujë inherited land they had used for generations but had no legal instrument to manage. Cutting was unregulated, grazing was unbounded, and the gullies above the springs widened every winter.

In 2004 representatives of nine villages registered the Association for the Communal Use of Forests and Pastures "ILENJ" Krujë as a non-profit organisation under Albanian law. The first act of the members' assembly was unglamorous: a written inventory of every parcel, every user household, and every disputed boundary.

The first management plan covered 340 hectares. By 2011 the association had been asked by neighbouring communes to extend its methodology to their pastures, and the area under plan passed 900 hectares. Today ILENJ works across 1,240 hectares in the Krujë region and advises three further associations in central Albania on plan drafting and grazing calendars.

The work has not been linear. We lost 22 hectares to fire in the summer of 2017 and spent four years replanting it. We have had years where the membership fee went uncollected and years where a single donor grant paid for more nursery stock than a decade of dues. What has held is the assembly: nine villages, one vote each, meeting twice a year without fail since 2004.